


Every Day the Dog Eats a Dollar

by worstie



Category: Original Work
Genre: Cunnilingus, F/F, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, Internalized Misogyny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-13 00:27:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29019675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worstie/pseuds/worstie
Summary: If you’re so brave, then let me be too, you’re nothing you’re nothing and you’ll never have a boo—
Relationships: mother and daughter - Relationship, this is making me piss myself laughing i am well aware, wife/wife





	Every Day the Dog Eats a Dollar

Inexorable, on velveteen couch, on the platform, room replete with coffee and cackles, “She looks like a sow! She can’t even walk right anymore. I mean, will you try to tell me that that’s good? A woman of fifty and she can barely waddle out of her house. Raising her legs like a dog around fire hydrants...” 

Mallory huffs laughs into trepanated foam, flattening it up the side of the cup. “Yeah.”

She flicks her eyes to Madison to check for a smile and is met with saccharine derision which only makes her huff harder. Mallory hopes Madison, who mom’s never opened up to knowing, is in turn open. It’s just subjugation, her eyes convey to Madison, inveterate and bilateral. Putting others down when there’s nothing to pull yourself up by. Scrambling for that cognitive dissonance, paired with ready smile, seems awfully mean. She gets it from mom. It is not funny, and she wishes she believed that. 

“Be careful that the little one doesn’t eat too much. She’s looking quite big for her age.”

She’s gestating, Mallory opens her mouth to say, to assuage her wife with a stupid word. 

Mom beats her to it, to aggravate, “And have you baptised her yet? I’m sure even you two would be allowed to baptise your child.”

Madison’s got a fierce meanness to her too—Mallory simply married her cause she’s just like mom. 

“There’s not a river big enough to baptise her,” Madison says. 

Mom pauses, noticing Mallory’s stifled laugh. She furrows her brow as if to say: you know, it’s really not nice to laugh at other people. The joy Mallory feels is immense: there was a time where mom wouldn’t speak to her or—especially—Madison, and their coffee catch-ups mainly consisted of sitting and staring. Sitting and staring.

Coming out bore instant depredation and constant contingencies. A foreboding channeled out into each furrow of every arid lane of Smokey City suburbia. After the one time, Mallory knew not to try it again, pearls clutched even in a sow-sty. A look was the soft injunction, not piercing or particularly poignant. When mom cast her eyes sideways, awash with resentful ridicule, albeit a mortifying ordeal, it didn’t stab. It scraped, clawing and cleaving her down the middle. Later, dully tapping the back of a spoon against muscle. Or skidding against bone. Just the thought of it stirs Mallory up into submission. She mimed it to a friend—said he could tell she was really feeling it, hah! 

Before Mallory brought her first girlfriend home, mom would tell her that if she could have a do-over she’d marry a woman. That she felt like she’d be in a much more reasonable deal that way: like, women, just, you know, get each other. 

Madison excuses herself. “I’m just gonna check on Macy. The coffee’s amazing, by the way, Marla.”

Now that’s true. Mom does make the best coffee. No one does it like her. Mallory’s fingers and eyes pull and squeak circles along the delicate china before gulping big to the tune of terrace door whinging. Wind promotes Madison’s push into a shove which makes raucous rattle at the door, enough to dissolve even mom’s feint/smile.

“You know, that stupid dog,”— Missy, a 60-pound german sheperd that Mallory’s daughter is currently probably taunting (she’s a docile thing, both the dog and the girl, she’s a good mother)—”won’t stop eating. He just left it here with no worry about how I’m supposed to take care of it. Every day I waste at least a dollar on dog food. What’s a dollar a day over two years? That’s how much he owes me.”

Three months ago Mallory received her dad’s new number from her brother. Dad’s ill and won’t make it another three. She has not texted him, and she won’t. Why force it? Better to let this drifting permeate. One day she’ll die too and leave her family unscathed. 

“That’s like 700 bucks,” she responds. 

“Yeah, well, if he was alive, I’d make him pay for it. I don’t know why everyone thinks I’ll just take on whatever they decide to dump on me. I don’t know when anyone did that for me.” Mom has chronic paucity of patience, jumping over herself to make it to another presupposition. Good: she doesn’t notice herself that she’s killed dad off, so it’s not awkward. Mallory recalls returning alone, before Madison. The house felt like no one else had ever stepped into it, old folk tale, cloistered, auburn, balmy. Mom cried while showing her their frankly god-awful wedding photos. Teeth-rotting. Even then mom spoke about him like he was dead. And how Mallory wished he was, him having slammed mom’s spiderweb frame into the body of the coiled bed, no mattress, for the last time just a month before before finally and finally departing. “I don’t want this for you. To worry like I do, counting every penny.”

Mom’s vague, albeit stark-clear to Mallory, micro-denigration of Mallory’s marriage, stings.

“How’s the pie? Madison made sure to use real butter, no margarine.” “She didn’t make God knows what.” Madison’s made Mallory a baby, among other things, but mom is probably referring to that very apple pie, sliding morsel on plate like brush on canvas. “Now you have to do the dishes after her now like I had to after you. Now you’ll see. Not a minute rest when you were back here. No help from anyone.”

“Like a hotel.”

“Well what else was it?” there’s a look of contempt at being quoted that’s bordering on that harbinger of depredatory contingencies. She huffs. She reaches the seaboard, tips, smiles genuine. She leans over and places her veiny hand on the couch between them, not quite touching. “You did grow up to be so good. Hah, I lived to see it. And do you need any money now? I was going to give you a fifty to buy yourself something nice, you can take it from my bag, you know where it is. I also have a new pair of pants upstairs that are a little too big for me, too—” Missy’s bark cuts through the house and mom’s chin is like a dagger drawn in that direction. “I need to call Paul to get her. I can get no peace. What’s enough is enough...”

“Last time he nearly killed her.” 

The squeakiness and scratchiness roll and flatten secure and you scarcely hear the dissonant lilt. “He wouldn’t have hit her unless she deserved it,” mom says, tongue clicking. “The pie could use less sugar.” 

“Goes well with the coffee,” Mallory says, watching mom’s mouth move. 

“I always preferred your pie to anyone else’s,” Mom praises, chewy. Mallory tips her head and then giggles so airily that she almost chokes. 

“Thank you mommy,” it comes out high and unironic and her grin is painful but doesn’t wane as mom scoffs. Horn of healthy.

Mallory thought she would have to become famous to ever bring home a wife. Eccentric artist who’s done it all, and it’s been long okay for rich folk to be gay. She’s made peace with not becoming famous until she steps over this threshold and feels she should have tried harder. She wants to offer elaboration, consolation, amends: In my thoughts it was always me and my daughter, no man, no one. I’m sorry for how it turned out. I wish I could have done it alone. You’ve done too much for, for me to do this to you. But why didn’t you ever like me? Why aren’t we living in the mountains, braiding each other’s hair, singing? But if I imagine it for too long, both of our hands start slipping with grease and I notice the disgusting fungal textures of your face, so alike mine. I don’t want to touch you either. 

_It’s really stupid, at this point, not to know, not to care, Not to try; let us play cupid, while you’re refuse, And I’m your wife and I’m your boss, I’m everyone you’ll chance across—_

Mallory dips. Missy corrals her toward the wife, glowing when Mallory bends down to hold her furry little face in her greedy fat hands. She wants to take her for a walk, wants to query the search bar about whether it’s humane to euthanize a neglected dog, she’s not sure she could do it, she probably could, not right now, anyway. Madison would sort it out, if queried. Even though Mallory has a waitressing job, no discipline and a tendency to whim, Mad gives her everything. Not because she can give her finite looks and a place to empty herself, but because she sees.

Gravelly sounds come from the shed, crackling of a sunlit fire. Macy’s playing in the shed. There’s no fire, though there is smoke. With her other hand, Madison is angry-swiping. The knuckle of her thumb crams content to the top of the screen. 

“Hi.” Mallory’s a clown. Hi, hello, welcome to my mother wound unboxing: pleonastic, convoluted, faux-removed. Purposefully thesaurized, a hopeful patronising. Please, please, let these not reach your mind, let alone your heart, lest I hurt you like I want to. 

The syllable influences Madison to look up. Thanking lucky stars, Mallory needs not speak more.

“Hey,” Madison says, brow lax for a moment, and then she says: “Let’s go home. Like, I get it, I know she’s been alone her whole life, moreso lately, and I know it’s hard for her to realise she isn’t talking to herself when someone comes over, and I hate what she went through with him even if he was a vet, but…”

There’s an ass on the phone. Run-of-the-mill, yet despite all odds it fires up the mind more than the loins. But it does bring up red, orange room, having Madison prone, eyelids closed with buttocks, so that when Mallory detached, sopping, kohl fakes looked back at her. And she couldn’t stand the sight of it, had to stuff hungry with plastic, unfeeling while omnifeeling, loving not Madison nor the sex, but the disastrous desire and ineffability of feeling the same about it. 

Madison is very good at talking while swiping, whereas a screen will eat Mallory up. Mad won’t repeat herself when Mallory heaves those cow eyes up and asks her to. Sometimes Mallory wonders about all the things she’s missed and misheard, but she hasn’t mentioned it to her yet. Madison listens the first time, and remembers everything. It was unfair of Mal to believe that Madison would somehow omit the war from memory, easily set it aside. She’s just a no-holds-barred kind of gal. 

Madison stubs her half-smoked cigarette out, making sure it’s cold before putting it in the pocket of her $215 straight Eileen Fishers. Fag packed secure and carried-on lest the hen goes pecking. Mad leans against the shed with a posed exhale and scrolls past the ass. Sex, money, words, knowing, feeling—in the end all symptoms of woman. The complete lack of desire for men projected as their inability to be desired. A whole swath disregarded on something imagined. Though there is something to it, the laughable razor burn of divine femininity. The better Mal got at getting men to like her, the less she liked them. “Men are visual creatures.”* Yet they rarely saw. Mad bought both their phones. Mad asks less of her than a man would. Maybe that’s what being gay is. Lesbian. “Nouns, after all, are supposed to pick things out.”* Maybe for some women cunnilingus is insurmountable. Maybe that alone makes the difference. 

_If you’re so brave, then let me be too, you’re nothing you’re nothing and you’ll never have a boo—_

All things real are not, and all things impalpable are. Madison sees right through the way Mallory creams her face. She smirks in a way that says, I know: because it’s so fungal, alike mine. Mal wears her desire for Mad like a flame that warms everyone around her and draws them in. Woman isn’t real; and women, like, just, you know, get each other. 

It’s around the shed and inside before Mallory and Madison realise what the scuttling and the crackling was. Macy’s diaper pokes out from under the pink frill of her dress as she bends over, elbow-deep in what she must think are cookies. She’s nibbling. 

Before color can reach Mal’s cheeks, Madison has picked their daughter up and is holding her close to her chest. “No, no, no,” she keeps repeating. No, no, no baby, no. Next to their heads on a shelf is a torn-into box of rodenticide. Way too close to the dog food Macy was tucking into. 

Mal holds her wife, Macy between them. They’re a cool little triad. Madison’s face cracks, Mal’s in a smile. Even after incessant unsolicited polling, they don’t know what to do. Flick her, just a little? Isolate her, deprive attention, make sure she knows they don’t speak to people over a simple mistake? 

Mal pulls away and looks at Madison. Missy barks at their feet, lapping up the company. Soon she’ll be wresting that obstinate chain again, so Mallory lets her annoy them as much as she wants to. She really does make herself into some God-given anti-loneliness balm. Really she loves Missy just as much as Missy loves her. 

Madison is a great mother. The sigh of relief for privacy is suspended but felt, and she cries all the same. She wraps her whole self around Macy as Mal bends down to pick up scattered pellets. Baby’s quiet. 

It’s an anecdote. 

Just for them. They are better left unseen. 

_It’s not a glimpse on the street anymore, it’s a constant and consistent failure on your part to find amore~_

**Author's Note:**

> *Asha Christina (Youtube, one video or other)   
> *David Foster Wallace, “greatly exaggerated”
> 
> thank you for reading! same username on IG. @cancelorette on tumblr.


End file.
